Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.
Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.
He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is “color-blind,” by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color – to look past it – to the “you” beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self.
But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.
On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross.
Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.
A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end – he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle.
The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation...
I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.
The fundamental skill of all mothers – the management of time – was beyond her. She measured time in pages.
And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.
Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.” “Another.
Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?
Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.
A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.” “For.
They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world – and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.
And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides – no matter what Brent Council may claim – an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: ‘Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.’ Important category.